SACO, Maine — “We can fight it all we want, but I think nature is going to win in the end. So, people that buy homes on the coast, good luck," Doug Wood of Saco said.
Camp Ellis in Saco is one of several coastal communities in southern Maine, but its picturesque views are getting more and more threated by climate change.
Residents are used to storms and flooding, but they say it seems to be getting worse.
“Everything’s washing away," David Daigle said. "It’s literally being pulled back into the bay, so when the tides are coming up now you only got about 35 feet of actual sand at high tide, where last year we had about 70 feet."
And the facts are there to back up those observations. According to the southern Maine planning and development commission, southern Maine has experienced four times as many nuisance flooding events in the past 10 years compared with the average of the past 100 years.
Jessica Brunacini is a coastal resilience specialist with Maine Sea Grant. She said it’s not that climate change has gotten to the point where it’s so extreme that it’s a lost cause.
“The coast is a very dynamic place, right? Sand moves up and down seasonally, inland and outland. In the winter it’s kind of dragged away; in the summer it’s brought back so there are some of these natural processes. The challenge is that climate change and sea level rise are exacerbating the kind of erosion we are seeing here," Brunacini said.
The southern Maine planning and development commission, along with the Wells Reserve and Maine sea grant, started a two-year project to help fight climate change back in 2021, and it’s nearing completion.
The groups are working to find a nature-based solution to fight this growing problem.
“We’re trying to preserve the environments that we really value here in southern Maine and that are important from the community perspective as well as the economic perspective, like our beautiful beaches and our salt marshes, and try to not only preserve the existing habitat we have but also enhance the habit we have," Abbie Sherwin, the senior planner and coastal resilience coordinator for SMPDC, said.
It's a tall order, but Sherwin is leading a team that’s up to the task to help save part of Maine’s southern coast.
“The regional plan will identify common challenges and vulnerabilities and hazards that all 10 communities are facing like coastal flooding, beach erosion, habitat degradation and loss and will outline specific vulnerable areas that are sort of priority areas across the coastline," Sherwin said.
The SMPDC is wrapping up the final phase of the project with a resiliency plan for coastal communities expected by August of 2023.
It's a plan that could act like a road map to combat Maine’s changing climate.